The losing fight for integration in SF’s first housing projects

Valencia Gardens, low income housing project in San Francisco, 05/22/1952

Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

The whites-only policies in San Francisco’s first public housing projects in the early 1940s, described in the last Portals, were mainly aimed at keeping Chinese Americans in Chinatown and out of America’s great experiment in federally funded dwellings. But if they kept blacks, Japanese Americans and other minorities away as well, that was just fine with the people in charge.

The San Francisco Housing Authority justified its policy as preserving the city’s “neighborhood pattern.” When challenged, the agency’s executive director, Albert Evers, said, “We have good reason to believe that any city policy involving enforced commingling of the races would not necessarily be evidence of equal rights but would undoubtedly jeopardize public peace and good order.”

In 1940, a remarkable multiracial coalition, the Western Addition Housing Council, began fighting for integrated public housing throughout the city. Its members included stakeholders in the racially mixed Western Addition, including blacks, Japanese Americans and progressive white labor leaders. As Charlotte Brooks points out in “Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California,” outside of communist circles, such a cross-racial alliance was unprecedented in the city’s history.

Ultimately, however, the group did not achieve its goals. For starters, it did not represent the entire black community: Some conservative black leaders feared that an integration policy would erode African Americans’ housing advantages over Chinese Americans, who had long endured fiercer discrimination in the city than even blacks.

“Politicians at least paid lip service (to blacks), and only in San Francisco could a black editor claim that ‘a large Oriental population in this state will strengthen the sentiment against letting down the bars of intermarriage,’” Brooks writes. “Many African Americans understood the benefits that accrued to them because of San Francisco-style nativism.”

The NAACP also adopted this position, worrying that the Housing Authority would “sandwich us in with the other race groups in a project.”

Valencia Gardens, low income housing project in San Francisco, 05/22/1952

Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

In fact, the Housing Authority had begun secretly buying land in the Western Addition with the intention of building a project for blacks there. It did so secretly because it knew that whites would resist a black project even in this racially mixed neighborhood.

The Western Addition Housing Council’s activism finally forced the Housing Authority to acknowledge its secret, and in October 1940 the agency filed an application to build the project, Westside Courts, at Bush and Baker streets.

In March 1941, 400 people turned out for a public meeting about the project. The contentious, three-hour session showed that the Housing Authority’s earlier evasiveness about its discriminatory racial policies had eroded its credibility. Everyone suspected that this new project would be for blacks only, but the agency refused to acknowledge it.

Although it opposed segregation, the Western Addition Housing Council concluded that getting some public housing for blacks was better than nothing — even if that meant selling out their Japanese American colleagues and neighbors. And most progressives were focused on African American needs.

Valencia Gardens, low income housing project in San Francisco, 05/22/1952

Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

The Housing Authority “recruited some of the black community’s most conservative leaders,” Brooks writes, “forming a Negro Advisory Council that endorsed the ‘neighborhood pattern’ and called for a segregated, blacks-only Westside Courts.”

Still, there were plenty of white opponents of an all-black housing project in the neighborhood, and the city sided with them. Although the federal government had provided its share of the money needed to build the project, the Board of Supervisors refused to provide the necessary supplemental funding. “Like many white San Franciscans, numerous city leaders viewed the growing African American population with great unease,” Brooks writes.

With the project stalled, the Western Addition Housing Council sued the Housing Authority to integrate all its projects. Within days, however, a riot broke out in Detroit when white residents protested a housing project being built for blacks near their neighborhood. Officials had long dreaded the prospect of civil unrest over enforced integration, and the riots confirmed their fears.

“Suddenly,” Brooks writes, “Washington and San Francisco found the money to finish West Side Courts, short-circuiting the WAHC’s lawsuit and ensuring that other SFHA developments remained all-white.”

By the time Westside Courts opened in 1943, World War II was raging and the Western Addition had a full-blown housing crisis, as thousands of newly arrived blacks swelled the neighborhood’s population by 500 percent. The 136 units at Westside Courts barely had an impact.

To address the crisis, the Housing Authority built three all-black projects at Hunters Point and three slightly integrated ones. But combined, these projects added fewer than 500 units to San Francisco’s nonwhite housing stock. And by corralling many of the city’s black residents into racially segregated enclaves in a remote, poor part of the city, the Housing Authority had helped set in motion a process whose destructive effects the city is still dealing with today.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

Trivia time

The last trivia question: In prestatehood days, what goods were known as “California dollars”?

Answer: Cowhides.

This week’s trivia question: What legendary building once stood on the site of the Transamerica Pyramid?

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.